


once long ago and far away

by tielan



Category: Dark Is Rising Sequence - Susan Cooper
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-15
Updated: 2018-12-15
Packaged: 2019-09-18 11:30:10
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,348
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16994175
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tielan/pseuds/tielan
Summary: The earliest years of Merriman Lyon.





	once long ago and far away

**Author's Note:**

  * For [blacktail_chorus](https://archiveofourown.org/users/blacktail_chorus/gifts).



The world has been remade anew many times since first Merriman walked away from his village.

That age was back when the world was young, when magic was still settling itself in the world. When power was ripe and easy, when the magic came without effort.

–

 

Merriman first meets the Lady when they’re young.

Her smile is beautiful, her courtesy a heady draught. He is not her equal in rank; she is not his equal in power. They are connected by bonds deeper than their situation, bound by a future that neither of them can yet conceive.

And yet, already, there is imbalance.

Her power is not as his; her life is constrained, bound about by the demands and dues of her sex and rank. She doesn’t know what she is, and he sees her power but not her future – not then, not yet.

Magic is still settling, finding its outlet in raw individuals. In most it runs untamed, like a stallion unbroken and barely useful. Others – he among them – have the ability to control it, shape it form it.

Many generations later he will realise that magic is not the same as the power of an Old One. In the now of his youth, he masters it as best he can, and uses it in service to a master neither kindly nor cruel but simply oblivious. 

That first age ends in tragedy and grief – hope lost to death, the Dark risen high.

This is, in large part, to the Lady herself, when she falls to a darkness within her. An Old One cannot turn to the Dark, but they can be corrupted, their power turned against the Light. And he is young and knowing and, yes, arrogant, thinking he knows better, can guide her better, can control her better.

He knows her too well at the end, her eyes fixed on visions of what cannot be, her vengeance given power and force in the casting of men on a battlefield – glory and grievance both. And he is the one who must strike her down in the end. He is the only one with the strength to fell her on the battlefield, with the power to counter her and kill her.

Her death brings the end of the war they waged against each other, but also the end of an age of hope – and the kingdom of Light that was promised to follow it. More than anything else, he feels the bitterness and hardship of that.

For a long while – months, years, decades, and more - he wanders.

He grieves her loss bitterly in his own way – the possibilities that she never reached, the pathways that perhaps he closed off to her in his youthful certainty.

In this age the Light has fallen to the Dark.

–

The Light is not yet snuffed.

For a span of decades the Light holds thin and thready in the darkness, that first torch lit beneath the banner of the Queen who rises to power as the first age collapses.

That flame passes to her son, and thence to her granddaughter before guttering out in an age of the Dark.

And he travels far and wide, trying to forget his youth and his failure. But as he travels he starts to see that if the torch held high has been snuffed, still candles shine bright in the bleakness.

–

The next time he encounters the Lady, they don’t recognise each other – not at first.

He stands at the shoulder of a young man struggling to find his place in this age, older and wiser and more wary in his magic. The magic comes more powerfully upon him now, but it is rarer and harder to control, and he is no longer the peer of the young man he is charged to protect, but a mentor.

She, too, has grown older – older and more cunning, with a bitter edge to it. There is still beauty in her – but more, he thinks, there is strength.

Strength that is more than the meld of anger and power that she wielded the last time they met. This is the steady burn of a built fire, not the first rush of flame and kindling. It seems that she has learned how to master her own magic in the time between. She has learned what she is and how to control it. She has discovered the power in waiting and watching, and knows how to suborn without magic, where once she only knew to enchant.

This time, they are working towards the same thing - a court and kingdom for the Light, an oasis in the midst of an age rapidly turning to the Dark. Their hopes are both thwarted; she has learned control of herself, but not yet comprehended that she cannot control others.

It is in this age that he becomes distracted from the goal. The woman with whom he falls in love has some magic, a calm as deep and secret as a lake, and a need that near-drowns him. In her arms, he relinquishes the burdens that have weighed him down so long, and is content.

It is only later that he comprehends what he has missed - when armies have marched upon each other, and another battle has been born of betrayal and jealousy, envious power and sundered love.

In the bloody shadows of the battle, he finds her crouched by the edge of a lake, staring blindly across the wind-whipped water.

“We’ve done this before, haven’t we?”

She pins him with her wide, pale eyes and the beseeching look in them drags the answer from his unwilling lips.

“Yes,” he admits. “We have.”

–

This time he seeks knowledge across land and sea. He travels by foot where foot may go, by beast where beast may tread, by boat where rivers flow and oceans spume, and in dreams and visions where distance forbids.

He learns spells of earth, of fire, of sea, of wind. Wisdoms of beasts and birds, understandings of the stars and the oceans. The use of the deep, grounding power that lies within him, the peace of mind and soul that he learned through a young man in the high mountain, and the drumbeats and disciplines of blood and body that came to him through a woman sitting beneath a tree whose trunk was as swollen as her pregnant belly.

It’s a slow passing of knowledge, but it’s the way he was taught and he knows no other.

–

The third time, she sees him, knows him, remembers.

She’s herding the locals into the great hall, he’s protecting the rear of the column of refugees. Their eyes meet across thirty feet of snow, and he sees recognition dawn.

“You!”

He bows. The old bow, the courtly one that came so awkwardly to him as a boy, but which now sits more comfortably in his skin. “Lady.”

But there is no time for questions and recriminations then for the people are settling into the old stone, and there are plaints to be heard and quieted, supplies to be brought out and managed. And then one of the outriders comes with the news that the marauders come along the northern road bringing _things_ of nightmare with them.

“The Dark is coming,” she says, and he can hear the emphasis in her words.

“I can turn it aside.”

“ _We_ can turn it aside.” Her looks is a challenge, and he feels the slap of it through the ages. “Unless the great sorcerer Merlin scorns the assistance of a mere woman?”

He smiles, remembering this archness, this challenge. She kept Arthur on his toes in those days also. “I’ve learned not to scorn any assistance offered me, Morgana.”

“So an old dog can learn new tricks?”

“An old dog, a prince’s manservant...” He shrugs, and watches her smile mantle.

“Then shall we?”

Outside in the crushing cold, they walk to the crossroads and stand facing the north, the spells of misdirection and confusion rising in their minds.

“So you know,” he murmurs, “I go by the name ‘Merriman’ these days.”  
 


End file.
